THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



JULY, 1878. 



CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 1 



Br Professor EMIL DU BOIS-EEYMOND, 



OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN". 



PART I. 

 I. The Primordial Period, or Age of Unconscious Inferences. 



THE relation of man to Nature primordially and of savage races in 

 the present day is, as we know, very different from what it has 

 been represented to be by poets and philosophers. In the delightful 

 pictures their fancy painted there was nothing true : the idyllic condi- 

 tions amid which they fancied the still youthful human race as living 

 never have existed anywhere. The history of man the world over has 

 its beginning not in a golden age, but in an age of stone. Instead of 

 noble shepherds and loVely shepherdesses, who, under benignant skies 

 amid picturesque scenes, live in innocence on the produce of their 

 flocks, decorously enjoying all the purest gifts of fortune, the reality 

 presents to our view rude, uncouth hordes struggling against hunger, 

 against wild beasts, against the inclemenoy of the seasons ; buried in 

 filth, in groveling ignorance, and brutal selfishness ; their women made 

 slaves, their old people cast out ; practising cannibalism first out of ne- 

 cessity, and then because superstitious usage had hallowed the custom. 

 Into the mental state of such beings we can enter as little as into 

 that of children. We cannot strip ourselves of the acquisitions made 

 by the generations whose successors we are, and whose priceless hoard- 

 ings of the fruits of their labor now inure to our benefit. If, as Paul 

 Broca teaches, the mean cerebral mass of Parisians in the present day 

 exceeds that of Parisians in the twelfth century, may we not assume 



1 An address delivered before the Scientific Lectures Association of Cologne. Trans- 

 lated from the German by J. Fitzgerald, A. M., and carefully revised by the author. 

 VOL. XIII. 17 



